Episode 43: Who Is Nelle?!!

Anna Devane, special agent of the World Security Bureau, is grappling with the recent revelation that Valentin Cassadine was known to her years ago when they were both cadets at the WSB. A combination of a different accent, a different name (Ivan Theodore), and a mis-shapen face and spine made his youthful self unrecognizable in comparison to the suave and confident man he had transformed himself into. Valentin’s international criminal enterprise of jewelry heists funded the many surgeries he’d had, but Anna feels there’s an element to the story she’s missing.

Anna finds Valentin at the local bar sitting with his new wife, Nina Reeves, discussing how to explain to his young daughter the unusual circumstances of her parentage. Interrupting their conversation with a smile, Anna tells Valentin that she understands why he’d kept an old photograph of her, something Nina was until then unaware of, and asks Valentin to come to her directly if there was anything else they needed to discuss, before leaving as suddenly as she arrived.

Anna goes home to continue to research Valentin’s time at the WSB, but is interrupted by a visit from Lulu and Laura Spencer. Lulu is the biological mother of Valentin’s daughter Charlotte, a child concieved artificially by the crazy machinations of the now dead Helena Cassidine. Helena’s beloved son Stavros had become obsessed with Lulu and wanted to father a child with her, so Helena vowed to make it happen. Upon finding Stavros was sterile, Helena secretly obtained a “deposit” from her husband’s bastard son Valentin and created an embryo. Upon finding out, outraged, Valentin used his burglary skills to steal the embryo and hired a woman, Claudette Beualeu, to be the surrogate.

Decades ago, Stavros had been instead obsessed with Lulu’s mother Laura, kidnapped her, and impregnated her, resulting in her son Nikolas Cassadine. Nikolas had been presumably killed when Valentin crashed into the lives of Lulu and Laura in Greece when he held them and others captive on Cassadine Island and, during a scuffle with a gun, shot Nikolas who fell out a window and plummeted to a watery death (?).

Considering Valentin a dangerous killer for the death of her brother, Lulu wants to sue for sole custody of Charlotte, and is hoping that Anna Devane has uncovered something they can use in the custody case. Anna doesn’t feel that anything in the case is relevant, and suggests to Lulu’s horror, that Lulu and Valentin try to work together for Charlotte’s sake. Laura and Lulu leave somewhat dejected.

Nina, meanwhile, is understandably confused by the interaction between her husband and Anna so Valentin takes her outside to explain.

Valentin admits that yes, he did have a photograph of Anna Devane from their days at the WSB together. He’d been a linquist, not trianed as a field agent like Devane, because he’d had severe scoliosis and was essentially a hunchback. He says that he and Anna had been friends, but the friendship that soured when Valentin had tried to kiss her and he’d seen nothing but revulsion in Anna’s face. It was that rejection that spurned Valentin on to get the surgeries to change his life, surgeries that ended up being life saving. After a touching moment between the two, Nina says she’s got to run a quick errand before they head home, and off she goes.

Nina goes straight to Anna’s home, demanding to know why she is stalking her husband. As she has it out with Anna, Nina sees an old photograph of Valentin on Anna’s computer screen. Shocked, she rails into Anna, accusing her of disliking Valentin because he makes her face an uncomfortable truth, that Anna is perhaps more shallow and ugly on the inside than she likes to think of herself. This seems to strike a chord in Anna, and Nina takes her leave.

Lulu, meanwhile, has taken Anna’s advice, and called Valentin to meet her at the local pub. She asks him if, instead of the impending custody suit, she could take up Valentin on his original offer of joint custody, as well as attend group therapy. Valentin refuses. Nina arrives just in time to witness a furious Lulu storming off, threatening Valentin that she would best him.

Nina and Valentin take a seat, and Nina tells Valentin who she’d actually gone to see. When she tells him she’d seen a photo of his old self, Valentin is visibly horrified, but Nina tells him it only furthered how much she admired him and his strength, and they share another lovely moment before finally heading home together.

At the Port Charles police station, Kiki tells Detectives Dante Falconeri and Nathan West that Samantha Morgan had figured out where he missing Franco was, and Sam had gone to a rescue him from being locked in a storage facility. She’d demanded to go alone, because she wanted to talk to Franco about the possible role her mother had in the murder of the unfortunately named Tom Baker. Franco was the chief suspect in the death of Baker, largely due to the fact that he’d locked Baker in a dog crate in his art studio in a misguided attempt to keep the man who’d raped Elizabeth Webber as a teenager wouldn’t get the chance to rape her, or anyone else, again. When Sam arrives at the storage facility, she breaks her way through the lock, to find a beaten bloody Franco lying on the floor amidst boxes. He tells Sam that he’s got no idea who attacked him, and that he will continue to keep quiet about the evidence pointing towards Sam’s mother, Alexis DAvis, as being involved in Tom Baker’s death.

He is brought to General hospital and treated for his many injuries. Nurse Elizabeth Webber was suspiciously absent, and Kiki tells Franco that she had been last seen following Tom Baker’s brother Seth out of the police station. Franco suddenly figures out that Seth Baker had been the person who attacked him, followed by the realization that Elizabeth Webber was last seen with her rapist’s brother. Franco sneaks out of the hospital to save Elizabeth from his attacker.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, did follow Seth to his home, trying to convince him of Franco’s innocence, and trying to enlist his help in finding the real killer. In Seth’s home, Elizabeth finds a photography book half hidden under the couch, with a collection of creepy stalker pictures of herself and other women in Port Charles. Seth is horrified, while Elizabeth sees the book as proof that Tom was still a threat. Afraid to let Elizabeth go to the police, Seth lets it slip that he saw his brother the night he died, and admits to having killed him after seeing him attack a drunken woman who narrowly escaped. Filled with regret, Seth admits to having been the one who attacked Franco, as well. At that moment, Franco bursts through the door, attacks him, and even though he tells Franco he deserves to be killed, Franco stops himself, right before the police smash through the front door. Seth Baker is taken into custody, while FRanco is brought back to the hospital, before being released and taken home by Elizabeth, where the two confess their love for one another and finally and officially consummate their relationship.

Alexis Davis, having blacked out parts of the night Tom Baker was killed, thought herself his killer. No longer wanting to hide her crime, she confesses to Detective Falconeri and her best friend and lawyer Diane Miller. She admits to having been attacked by Tom Baker, and wrestling the knife away from him, but when shown photographs to jog her memory, she remembers having run away, leaving him alone and alive in the alley. Her guilty conscious wiped clear, Alexis still doesn’t feel ready to have Diane plead her case to get her law license back, preferring to wait until she has her life more together.

Now that Alexis is no longer drinking, her ex-husband mobster Julian Jerome promises to no longer blackmail her into letting him live in her house by threatening to reveal that she’d drunkenly run him down with her car. He tells her he’d only been doing so in order to help her get sober, and now that she was, he’d move out.

While he organizing the last of his belongings, Julian’s nefarious and long assumed deceased sister Olivia comes through the front door. Upset at her continued hold on him to do her bidding under threat of harm to those he loves, Julian is angry at her presence there. He assures Olivia that he’s squashed the investigation of his son-in-law Jason Morgan to discover the true mastermind behind the car bomb that had been planted in Julian’s car, a bomb that missed it’s target and accidentally killed Morgan Corinthos. Alexis comes home to find the siblings in her livingroom, and it is revealed that Olivia has become Alexis’s new AA sponsor, “Liv” – totally unaware of her relation to Julian. Julian leaves, powerless.

Julian is unaware that his daughter, Samantha Morgan, had engineered a fight between her husband, Jason, and his good friend and one-time boss mobster, Sonny Corinthos, at General Hospital solely for Julian to see. Sam, Jason, and Sonny agreed to stage a falling out between Jason and Sonny so that they can lull the mystery woman behind the car-bomb into a false sense of security, while they continue the investigation in secret, and send the pregnant Sam and their son to a safehouse.

Curtis Ashford, the private dick who is helping Sonny and Jason with their investigation, had hoped to get himself back on the force, but is rebuked by Police Commissioner Jordan Ashford (no relation) because of their personal past. Not only that, but the witness statement they’d gotten isn’t accepted by the DA, and Sonny Corinthos is still being charged with the murder of his own son Morgan.

Jordan has not told her boyfriend Doctor Andre Maddox that in a recent trip to Baltimore to question a witness in the car bomb case, she and Curtis shared a few moments of passion before she stopped it. Instead, Jordan lets Andre apologize for his annoyance at her leaving town with Curtis. She apologizes for making him feel not her man of choice, and promises to make it up to him.

Carly Corinthos’s personal assistant, Nelle Hayes, continues to fabricate a chain of evidence to falsely implicate Sonny in having an affair with her to enact revenge against Carly for a thusfar unrevealed motivation. Sonny’s eldest son Michael questions her about her relationship status, and she coyly says she’s in a casual relationship with an older man. Carly’s daughter Jocelyn is compiling photographs for a family tree, and is enlisting the help her mother, and her grandmother Bobbie Spencer. Nelle and Michael arrive, and Bobbie, who has been suspect of Nelle, notices that she has a very strong reaction to a photograph of Carly as a baby. When conversation comes up about Carly’s adopted parents, Nelle is visibly disturbed, and leaves obviously upset.

At the Metro Court hotel, Nelle Hayes gets a bouquet of flowers delivered to her at work, which she’d sneakily arranged herself, is witnessed by Michael and Jocelyn, the note signed as being from simply “S”. When Felicia Jones visits the Metro Court, she sits at the bar chatting with Nelle, slagging on Bobbie Spencer, and offering to give Nelle’s apartment interior a revamp in thanks for helping out with her daughter’s recent wedding. Nelle accepts the offer. Moments later, retired PI Felicia meets up with Bobbie, revealing that the two women are in cahoots, scheming together to find out what they can about Nelle’s true motives.